Meysen
Kayson's Pii system, Arkanis sector on the border of the Mid and Outer Rims,
home to the Greel Wood Logging Corporation founded in the first days of the
Empire and one of the first Rebel Alliance training grounds and safe havens,
Bival Rhett was also one of the first children of the Rebellion. Laying low
after successfully evading the proponents of the New Order and arriving at
Pii 3, the first permanent Rebel base was established by a mixed squadron of
ARC-170, Z-95, and Y-wing starfighter pilots.

Rhett's
parents, a starfighter pilot and a mechanic, met before the reestablishing
of contact to the fledgling Rebel command. While their squadron remained
stationed on Pii 3, Outlander squadron Quartermaster Amaranth Rhett became
pregnant with her first of two children. Rhett's formative years were spent
with a dwindling number of fighter craft, and an abundance of pilots as
craft were scavenged for spare parts. Bival's father, Zakarius, was able to
spend time with his family in between missions as pilots were rotated to
available craft. Amaranth maintained her position as squadron quartermaster,
as few skilled personnel were available, and so it was not uncommon for
Bival to watch a squadron launch with his father Zakarius and then spend
time with his mother attempting to maintain the vessels they possessed with
the dearth of supplies they had.

Bival
became nothing short of a mechanical prodigy, learning the art of
substitution from his mother, but where his heart lay was in becoming a
starfighter pilot like his father. At the age of six, Bival commandeered the
Z-95 assigned to his father for a training mission by sneaking inside while
Zakarius said good-bye to his family. By the time they noticed Bival was
missing, the cockpit canopy was sealed. Bival, however, never made it off
the ground; nevertheless, he was not to be dissuaded from wanting to fly
from then on.

Zakarius
began allowing his son simulator time in the one aging unit the squadron
possessed, often late at night when he should have been sleeping. In several
instances, they were caught by Amaranth, who could do nothing but merely
chide the two rather than spoil what father-son time they had together.

By the
time Bival was ten, all of the squadron's ARC-170s lay in pieces as they
gradually required more maintenance and had fewer parts available. New craft
seldom arrived, and when they did, it was in ones or twos to replace pilots
lost along the way. When Bival was twelve, the news arrived after a raid on
an Imperial medical supply shipment. Bival's father wasn't coming home. The
Z-95 he'd been piloting had been tag-teamed by the Empire's new TIE
fighters, and there had been no rescue beacon.

The
remaining Rhetts were devastated, none more so than Amaranth, who had done
all she could to maintain all of the squadron's starfighters equally because
she never knew which her husband would be flying. Over the next few years,
Bival drifted away from his family, often watching squadron launches alone
and logging hours in the simulator unit that eventually broke at the age of
fourteen, while continuing to work professionally as a mechanic with his
mother, while his new family became the pilots. Eventually, at the age of
sixteen, the squadron commander allowed him to be fitted for a flight suit
and join a training mission.

His
first real time up could not have gone more wrong. Their training mission,
which required several hyperspace jumps through nearby systems ran straight
into the path of an Imperial patrol. As the aging Dreadnaught deployed its
meager compliments, some of the Rebel pilots that had less experience than
Rhett and his thousands of hours in a flight simulator panicked, and forgot
their training. The instructors and Rhett managed to protect most of the
students and fend off the TIE squadron, Rhett himself earning three
confirmed kills in a Z-95. The Outlanders, having lost three rookies to the
TIEs and reducing the TIEs by eleven, managed to withdraw and return to Pii
3. Rhett earned his wings that day, and the rank of Ensign as he was
accepted into the Rebel Alliance starfighter corps. His transfer was almost
immediate, as Outlander squadron was being disbanded, its pilots re-equipped
and shipped elsewhere. Quartermaster Amaranth Rhett and Ensign Bival Rhett
barely got time to bid good-bye before they were separated, while Bival's
younger sibling remained in the relative safety of the Pii system for the
immediate future.

Bival's
next assignments passed relatively quickly as he was constantly moved by
Rebel command from one base to the next as the Alliance kept moving, always
with the Empire nipping at its heels. Rhett was eventually permanently
assigned an X-wing and redeployed to the Ringali Nebula to a forming
squadron.